Superhero Tees: How to Compromise with Your Inner Crime Fighter

Whether it was when you picked up that first comic book from the comic shop, or when you plopped down next to the television on Saturday mornings to watch the latest episode of Batman, denying the magic you felt the first time you stampeded through the house pretending to ward off super villains is impossible. Duke, the family dog, often had to play the unfortunate role of villain around my household. It’s basically a rite of passage for kids to dream of being a superhero and not surprisingly, the kids that grew up with those superheroes are still dreaming of the day when they get bitten by a radioactive spider. Unfortunately, since we live in a society that deems running around in public wearing colorful superheroes as a mark of being loony, you may just have to settle. These shirts should help you quell that desire a little bit.

X-Men

Stan Lee may have created the easiest way to give superpowers to people with this strangely simple idea, but X-Men has no doubt been the one of most successful series in all of comic history. The roster has changed throughout the years, ensuring that there is a mutant that everyone can relate to.

Here’s a nod to some of the old school mutants. If dropped as many quarters in the X-Men arcade machine, you can almost hear Colossus yelling, “Rooooaawuugh” when you look that this thing.

These are the X-Men as I remember them. The X-Men cartoon was part of any child of the 90s faithful regiment of Saturday morning cartoons. Yes, Bishop rocked a jheri curl, but that’s how time traveling mutants from the future wore their hair. Besides, he made the jheri curl look way cooler than Darryl did from Coming to America.

Leave it to a bad guy to decide to bring mankind as we know it to an end to make way for the rise of a new race of mutants. Magneto has been the X-Men’s most villainous adversary since the comics began and few really capture what a really good bad guy can do for a comic books series like Magneto. And for the record, being bad is usually way more fun than being good.

Costume

The costume t-shirt is as close as you can get to looking like a superhero that won’t have people staring at you like a circus attraction. For some reason, if you wear a bright colored jumpsuit with strange symbols it’s unacceptable, but wear a t-shirt with the same style and you can walk out in public without any problem.

First, something for the ladies. The most powerful being in the Marvel Universe has almost always been Jean Grey, also known as Phoenix. It’s impossible for any X-Men fan to not be drawn to this shirt that recreates the look of the Phoenix costume seen in the 70’s Phoenix saga.

Finally, this Punisher t-shirt gives you a reason to be as mean to the bad guys as they are to you. The costume t-shirt even has pockets, which Frank Castle probably uses to store extra ammunition. No one will mind if you use them to store your keys instead though.

Nerdy

Yesterday’s comic book geeks have turned into today’s computer nerds, so a marriage of the two loves is inevitable. These shirts combine the interests of the tech nerd inside and comic book dork lurking inside of you.

Every tech nerd has a dozen flash drives lying around, but none of them have superpowers. Featured Artist Walmazan dares to ask the question, “What if they did?” The humorous design puts an interesting twist and a clever pun on flash drives and superheroes.

Video games and superheroes have always gone together hand in hand. At the time 8-bit graphics seemed like the most lifelike simulations. Now they just induce nostalgia for the days when video games resembled caricatures of Lego toys and the soundtracks sounded like a hive of angry bees. Either way the Avengers are here in all their 8-bit glory.

Wonder Woman

Surprised that some of the best t-shirts for women are of Wonder Woman? You shouldn’t be. Wonder Woman has been walloping bad guys across the page since the 1940s and quite frankly, it’s a bit surprising that male superheroes still have a job. Anything the boys do, Wonder Woman has done better. She even gave Superman a good thrashing when he was under mind control and he needed a little sense beaten into him.

No one is really sure what it is that Wonder Woman doesn’t want Superman, but you can be sure that it’s a real bombshell. Every secret that a superhero has is always ten times more shocking than your average person’s skeleton in the closet.

Until you discover that you are the last surviving super powered being of an alien race, or until you mutant power start developing, a superhero shirt is your best choice. Wearing one also beats the alternative of fighting strange criminals in tights. (It’s actually a lot less fun than it sounds).